Anaerobic Power Assessment in Athletes: Are Cycling and Vertical Jump Tests Interchangeable?

Abstract

Regularly assessing anaerobic power is important for athletes from sports with an explosive strength component. Understanding the differences and overlap between different assessment methods might help coaches or smaller-scale testing facilities maximize financial and temporal resources. Therefore, this study investigated the degree to which cycling sprint and vertical jump tests are interchangeable for determining peak mechanical leg power output in strength-trained athletes. Professional skiers (n = 19) performed unloaded squat jumps (SJ) and other jump forms on a force plate and a six-second cycling sprint (6sCS) test on an ergometer on six occasions over two years. Along with cross-sectional correlations between cycling and jumping power, correlations between longitudinal percent changes and agreement between magnitude-based inferences about individual changes were assessed. Among the tested jump forms, SJ reflected 6sCS best. However, despite extremely large cross-sectional correlation coefficients (0.92) between 6sCS and SJ, and moderate (Pearson’s r = 0.32 for 6sCS with SJ over one-year time spans) to large (r = 0.68 over shorter time spans) correlation coefficients on percent changes, magnitude-based inferences agreed in only around 50% of cases. Thus, for making qualitative assessments about the development of anaerobic power over time in athletes, cycling sprint and squat jump tests are not interchangeable. Rather, we recommend employing the test form that best reflects athletes’ strength and conditioning training.

Effects of 6 weeks of low-volume combined training on muscle power, muscular strength, and aerobic power in active young adults.

“…This study also found signi cant improvements of 9.4% in jump height. These results suggests that for young active adults low-volume CT may be enough to increase vertical jumping capacity, which is related to the anaerobic potency of lower limbs [31]. This chronic adaptation can be explained by improving the voluntary neural activation speed, related to the motor neuron recruitment speed and maximal motor unit discharge rate [32].…”

The reliability of a linear position transducer for measuring countermovement jump performance in national-level road cyclists

“…Unlike field-based athletes [ 18 ], peak power (absolute and relative) did not display acceptable inter-week reliability in the current population when using the mean of three CMJ trials. This contrasting finding is unsurprising in a cycling population due to the fatigability of anaerobic power in response to cycling load [ 6 , 19 ], resulting in high variations in cycling peak power [ 19 , 20 ], which is strongly related to vertical jump performance [ 7 – 9 ], including jump-derived peak power [ 7 ]. This concept partly explains why peak power measures displayed poor inter-day and -week reliability in the current study.…”

Korelasi status gizi dengan kebugaran calon atlit olahraga sepeda (Talent scouting)

“…Cabang olahraga sepeda sangat penting untuk membutuhkan vertical jump (Gross & Lüthy, 2020). Begitu juga cabang olah raga lainnya seperti, bolabasket, bolavoli, sepakbola dan lain sebagainya.…”